Hari: act of contrition for the weekend

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post here about the Independent writer Johann Hari which made a mistake. Time to rectify that.

Two days ago, Hari handed back his Orwell Prize and published a long and somewhat weaselly mea culpa in The Independent. (Readers new to this saga start here). Hari’s confession included confirmation that he had gone to considerable lengths to boost his friends and smear his enemies on Wikipedia under an assumed identity. The full extent of his lifting material to embroider his interviews is also now clear (see the critical comments at the foot here).

I didn’t condone Hari’s actions in my premature post. But I did argue that George Orwell would have taken the view that ridicule and revelation were enough, and that Hari needn’t have been stripped of the prize. That judgement looks particularly foolish in the light of what we now know; it was silly as it was. As Bagehot of The Economist pithily says, this isn’t a matter of training and teaching but a more basic one of character and integrity.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2011 at 10:07 am and is filed under UK Press.
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4 comments

I’m not quite sure how he’s managed to so openly “get away” with this either – in his apology he even tries to put it down to experience and the fact if he had asked colleagues at The Independent then they would have informed him what he was doing was wrong. Why if we take his apology at face value did he never think to do this, or at the very least did he never stop and think himself that this could be seen as plagiarism? The mind boggles.

You should not be so contrite. Hari was very plausible and argued with the intelligence which won him a double first at Kings, Cambridge. Now, he admits, that he was on such a fast track that he did not learn about JOURNAlISM. He says he now wants to do a journalism course.

Whatt better place than City.

Bob Jones

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